Image: Alphabet
Taara’s wireless optical technology was able to beam nearly 700TB of data in 20 days across the Congo River.
Alphabet’s internet balloon project Loon may be a closed chapter, but the company is finding new ways to use some of this technology to bring high-speed internet to remote and underserved areas.
Project Taara is Alphabet’s attempt to harness wireless optical tech to make fast internet accessible and affordable. In a blog post yesterday (16 September), the project’s director of engineering, Baris Erkmen, said that its wireless optical communications links are now beaming light-speed connectivity across the Congo River.
“I’m delighted to share that working with Liquid Intelligent Technologies, we recently helped bridge a particularly stubborn connectivity gap between Brazzaville in the Republic of the Congo and Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo,” he wrote.
Brazzaville and Kinshasa are only 4.8km apart, but because of the speed and depth of the Congo River, it wasn’t possible to establish fibre connection between the two cities. Instead, cables have to travel more than 400km to loop around the river.
Erkmen said that after installing links on both sides of the river, Taara’s technology was able to beam across nearly 700TB of data in 20 days with almost 100pc availability. While the connectivity won’t always be reliable in all weather conditions, he said he was confident it will “play a key role in bringing faster, more affordable connectivity” to the 17m people living in the two cities.
“Being able to deliver high-speed internet (up to 20Gbps) most of the time is a vastly better option than having millions of people miss out on the benefits of connectivity because the economics of laying hundreds of kilometres of cable in the ground simply don’t stack up.”
Project Taara’s predecessor Loon brought helium balloon-based internet to Kenya and delivered communications services to Puerto Rico and Peru following natural disasters in those countries.
Like Project Taara, it was part of Alphabet’s X research division that invests in ambitious but costly projects. However, Loon was shut down in January because it was unable to make a business case for the project and its path to commercial viability was “much longer and riskier than hoped”, according to X lab head Astro Teller.
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